This talk was delivered at the
Auburn Philosophical Society’s Roundtable on Hate,5 October 2001, convened in response
to the September 11 attacks a month earlier.

The events of September 11th have
occasioned a wide variety of responses, ranging from calls to turn the
other cheek, to calls to nuke half the Middle East—and every imaginable
shade of opinion in between. At a time when emotions run high, how should
we go about deciding on a morally appropriate response? Should we allow
ourselves to be guided by our anger, or should we put our anger aside and
make an unemotional decision?

D. H. Lawrence once wrote:

"My great religion is a belief
in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong
in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always
true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge?
All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention
of mind or moral, or what not."

At the other extreme, the Roman philosopher
Seneca argued that we should never make a decision on the basis of anger—or
any other emotion, for that matter. In his treatise On Anger, Seneca
maintained that if anger leads us to make the decision we would have made
anyway on the basis of cool reason, then anger is superfluous; and if anger
leads us to make a different decision from the one we would have made on
the basis of cool reason, then anger is pernicious.

This disagreement between Lawrence
and Seneca conceals an underlying agreement: both writers are assuming
an opposition between reason and emotion. The idea of such a bifurcation
is challenged by Aristotle. For Aristotle, emotions are part of
reason; the rational part of the soul is further divided into the intellectual
or commanding part, and the emotional or responsive part. Both parts are
rational; and both parts are needed to give us a proper sensitivity to
the moral nuances of the situations that confront us. Hence the wise person
will be both intellectually rational and emotionally rational. Emotional
people whose intellectual side is weak tend to be reluctant to accept reasonable
constraints on their behavior; they are too aggressive and self-assertive
for civilized society—too "Celtic," Aristotle thinks. They answer directly
to their blood, without fribbling intervention of mind or moral, and much
hewing and smiting ensues. But intellectual people whose emotional side
is weak are often too willing to accept unreasonable constraints on their
behavior; they lack the thumos, the spirited self-assertiveness, to stand
up for themselves, and so are likely to sacrifice nobility for expediency,
ending up as the passive subjects of a dictatorship like the ancient Persian
Empire. According to Aristotle, feeling less anger than the situation
calls for is as much a failure of moral perception as feeling more.
Only a full development of both the intellectual and the emotional aspects
of our reason can yield an integrated personality fit for freedom and social
cooperation. (Aristotle notoriously tries to turn all this into a justification
for enslaving Celts and Persians; but let us graciously focus our
attention on the Maestro’s smart moments, not his dumb ones.)

To see what Aristotle is getting
at (in his smart moments), recall the scene in the movie Witness
where some Amish farmers, among whom Harrison Ford’s character is hiding
out, are being harassed and humiliated by local bullies. The bullies are
well aware that the Amish, being pacifists, will not use violence even
in self-defense; as one Amish farmer explains to Harrison Ford, "it is
our way"—to which Ford responds, "well, it’s not my way," steps
out of the wagon, and gives the bullies a taste of their own medicine,
to the immense satisfaction of the audience.

This scene appeals to our emotions;
it inclines us toward a rejection of pacifism. Seneca would object that
scenes like this are manipulative and dangerous, insofar as they work on
our emotional responses rather than offering us a rational argument. But
Aristotle might well disagree. No one, he insists, becomes wise or virtuous
through rational arguments alone; people’s emotional and affective responses
need to be trained and habituated as well. Scenes like the one in Witness
may serve to educate our sentiments and hone our capacity for moral judgment,
by making salient the ethically relevant features of the situation and
prompting a salutary exercise of thumos.

If Aristotle is right, then Seneca
is wrong; emotional responses can facilitate our moral perceptions
rather than either displacing or merely echoing them. But that does not
mean that Lawrence is right; Aristotle is not advising us to place blind
trust in our gut reactions. Emotions can be mistaken, just as intellect
can; as Aristotle puts it, emotions are often like overeager servants,
rushing off to carry out our orders without first making sure they’ve grasped
them properly.

The terrorist attacks of September
11th have made us angry, and rightly so. Our anger gives form to our moral
perception, putting us in cognitive contact with two ethical facts: the
wrongness of the attack, and the rightness of retaliating against it. To
that extent, our anger sharpens our vision rather than obscuring it. However,
anger too can be an overeager servant, prompting us to act in ways that
may not square with the very facts of reason to which our anger is being
responsive. Feeling our anger is easy, but we have a responsibility to
think our anger as well.

Our anger embodies a judgment that
what the terrorists did on September 11th was wrong. But what was it that
they did? They rained down death from the skies upon innocent civilians
in order to express a grievance against our government. If, in the anger
of our military response, we are heedless of the lives of innocent civilians
in Afghanistan or elsewhere, then, in the name of our anger, we will have
infringed the very principle that our anger is supposed to be expressing:
we will be the ones raining down death from the skies upon innocent civilians
in order to express a grievance against their government. Those who answer
directly to their blood often end up having a lot of blood to answer for.

A number of television and online
commentators have said that civilians in enemy nations are not truly innocent,
because those civilians could and should have overthrown their governments
if they disapproved of them. In saying this, these commentators take themselves
to be expressing a hard-line position against the terrorists. But in fact
they are endorsing the terrorists’ position. For their argument commits
them to saying that I am responsible for any war crimes committed by my
government, since if I really disapproved of my government I could and
should have overthrown it. (I’m awfully curious to know how, but they never
seem to give details.) But this is precisely the terrorists’ position:
that any American is a legitimate target for the violent expression of
grievances against the American government. When a viewpoint motivated
by moral outrage against a terrorist attack ends up endorsing the very
principle behind that attack, it’s clear that anger has been acting as
an overeager servant and needs further instruction.

Some commentators distinguish between,
on the one hand, the direct and deliberate targeting of civilians, of the
sort that characterized the Allied bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima or
the recent attack on the World Trade Center, and on the other hand, what
goes by the military euphemism of "collateral damage"—that is, the unintended
(though not necessarily unforeseen) civilian deaths that result as a byproduct
from an attack on a military or otherwise hostile target, as occurred in
President Reagan’s bombing of Libya, President Clinton’s bombing of the
Sudan, and our current President’s ongoing bombing campaign against Iraq.
It is often maintained that while direct targeting of civilians is immoral,
collateral damage is not.

We know that the direct targeting
of civilians is immoral, because we know that the terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center was immoral. We dare not reject the former judgment
without undermining our right to uphold the latter. But why might collateral
damage be more justifiable? Well, the argument goes something like this.
Suppose Eric straps a baby to his chest and then starts shooting at me.
I can’t shoot him back without hitting the innocent baby. Yet although
it’s too bad about the baby, it seems plausible to say that I still have
the right to defend myself against Eric, and if the baby gets killed, the
blame should lie not with me but with Eric, for bringing the baby into
the situation in the first place. By the same token, it is argued, innocent
deaths that result as a byproduct from attacks on hostile targets should
be blamed on the hostile targets, not on the attackers.

But the moral legitimacy of collateral
damage in the Eric case seems to depend importantly on four factors: first,
the relatively small extent of the collateral damage (just the one baby);
second, the high probability that shooting at Eric will actually stop him;
third, the great extent of the contribution (total, as described) that
stopping Eric will make to ending the threat; and fourth, the absence of
any alternative way of stopping Eric that would be less dangerous for the
baby. The case for collateral damage grows weaker as we alter any of these
four variables. If Eric is shielded not just by one baby but by a whole
city of babies; or if there’s some doubt as to whether Eric is actually
even in the city; or if Eric is just one cog in a military machine, his
individual contribution to the total threat being fairly small; or if there
are ways of taking Eric out without bombing the city—to the extent that
any or all of these are true, the case for the legitimacy of collateral
damage is correspondingly weakened. As these variables move away from the
Eric paradigm, the moral difference between collateral damage and direct
targeting of civilians becomes more tenuous—as does the case for treating
the two as morally different. Since in most real-world cases of collateral
damage in warfare, most or all of these variables are shifted pretty far
away from the Eric paradigm, I conclude that a general military policy
of comfort with collateral damage is without justification. Such a policy
may be motivated by our anger, but it contradicts the very lesson our anger
can teach us, if we listen to the voice of our anger with a more subtle
ear.

Our topic tonight is hate. Yet so
far I’ve spoken about anger rather than hate. One might suppose
that what I’ve said about one will apply mutatis mutandis to the
other; but I think there is an important difference. Anger is often justified;
but hate, I think, is never justified, at least against a person.

Where does the difference lie? Well,
we can be angry with a person and still wish that person well; after all,
we are often angry with those we love, and we do not stop loving them while
we are angry with them. But we cannot hate a person and still wish that
person well. I think this makes hate morally problematic in a way that
anger is not. For I accept Aristotle’s conception of happiness as a life
of virtuous rational activity. Surely we should wish our enemies
to be more virtuous and more rational; after all, if they were more virtuous
and more rational, they wouldn’t have hijacked two airplanes and sent them
crashing into the World Trade Center. Any move, by anybody, in the direction
of greater virtue and greater rationality should always be met with approval.
But if Aristotle is right about happiness, then to wish for our enemies
to be more virtuous and more rational is ipso facto to wish for
them to be happier.

I think this must be what such moral
teachers as Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha mean when they advise us to
wish our enemies well. Obviously we should not wish success to our enemies’
projects; for those projects are evil, and they could not cease to be evil
without ceasing to be the projects they are. Hence hatred for those projects
is quite in order. But people can always cease to be evil without ceasing
to be. If they refuse to cease being evil, we may find it necessary, in
self-defense, to make them cease to be; but we should always prefer
that our enemies cease being evil. But what is that, but to prefer that
our enemies become better people—that they live better, more worthwhile,
less destructive, hate-filled lives? And if that is what we ought to prefer,
then we ought to wish our enemies well. And while that is compatible with
being angry at them, and with killing them if necessary, it is not compatible
with hating them.Δ

Roderick T. Long teaches philosophy
at Auburn University. He is currently writing a book on Wittgenstein and
Austrian economic methodology.